The case for Kamala Harris. Is she a good or bad choice for the Democratic presidential nomination? Is she the perfect replacement for Joe Biden? Or is she just not good enough? And is there any reason not to vote for her? To find out, we speak to Stelios and Harrison from New Culture Forum and the Lotus Eaters podcast.
00:00:00.240Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the podcast of Lotus Eaters, and I don't even know what day it is. It's Friday. What's the date today?
00:16:56.600Yes, and she also promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund, euphemistically called, for Black Lives Matter rioters and encouraged people to donate to it.
00:17:06.060I'm sure she's on board with all of these Soros-funded prosecutors as well who think that a certain amount of enforced inequality is necessary to make unequal people equal
00:17:16.840in trying to avoid disparate impact and therefore selectively enforcing the law based on racial criteria as well.
00:17:23.540Well, she says as much whenever she's caught in a lucid moment.
00:17:27.920But anyway, she won't abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it.
00:17:33.340These and not any specific policy positions are the reason The Atlantic is endorsing her.
00:17:38.520And that's interesting because the specific policy positions are something she's flip-flopped on quite a lot.
00:17:44.540She's taken lots of different positions on the border, on justice, on the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, nothing about the Nineteenth Amendment yet.
00:17:53.520But she's been, I mean, contradictory is a generous way of putting it, totally inconsistent, utterly...
00:19:37.600So you've got federal executive officials, so, of course, Joe Biden, former Democrat presidents, Dick Cheney, which seems like something you'd want taken off there.
00:19:46.380Yeah, Dick Cheney's endorsement, so, well, don't tell anyone.
00:21:42.420And so the question is, well, what are they exactly endorsing?
00:21:44.960And Kamala herself went on Stephen Colbert the other day and explained to us precisely what she's going to bring to the table.
00:21:51.880But a lot of people, especially independent voters, really want this to be a change election and that they tend to break for you in terms of thinking about change.
00:22:03.140You are a member of the president of the administration.
00:22:06.400Under a Harris administration, what would the major changes be?
00:23:10.940But, I mean, we'll listen to the rest of our answer to see how vacuous it is.
00:23:14.400What this next generation of leadership looks like, were I to be elected president, it is about, frankly, I love the American people and I believe in our country.
00:23:26.040I love that it is our character and nature to be an ambitious people.
00:23:33.360You know, we have aspirations, we have dreams, we have incredible work ethic and I just believe that we can create and build upon the success we've achieved in a way that we continue to grow opportunity and in that way grow the strength of our nation.
00:23:53.020So, for example, my economic policies, I think of it and I've named it as creating an opportunity economy.
00:23:59.180So it's about things like investing in small businesses.
00:26:14.840But she's just dropped a new accent, which is a Jamaican accent.
00:26:17.700I think, I don't know if you've got this on the thing, but yesterday she was talking about COVID quite a bit with this kind of predominantly Latina audience.
00:26:57.720But anyway, we'll leave that there because I don't really see much of a positive case for Kamala Harris, except as a children's entertainer, which may well be her next career move.
00:27:33.820Right, so Hungary has assumed the presidency of the EU Council until the end of 2024, and Viktor Orban went to the EU Parliament and gave a speech where he shared the vision that he has for Europe with other MEPs.
00:27:52.720And, as you expect, we had lots of really nice moments there.
00:27:57.820Orban really made the case for patriotism in Europe, and, predictably, people only had accusations, personal accusations, to make against him that he's a Russian asset.
00:28:10.020So, just to, sorry to pause, what does presidency of the European Council do?
00:28:15.500Well, it's probably not that much, right?
00:28:17.780Not that much. It's a rotating position every six months.
00:28:21.780But, I mean, you could say that it has a sort of symbolic nature, because the president of the EU Council gets to make more speeches and stuff.
00:28:33.720Yeah, a certain amount of power to define the agenda.
00:28:39.840It kind of gives a strong push for the tone that is being adopted.
00:28:45.700But, as you will see, a lot of people are just not having it, and they want Europe to be what it is right now, a multiculturalism hellhole.
00:28:55.060Is this more evidence of Europe going far right?
00:29:40.960So, basically, he made several key points.
00:29:44.820One of it is, we are not members of the EU because of what it is right now.
00:29:50.260We're members of the EU because of what it could be.
00:29:53.020And by that, he means a union that respects the sovereignty of member states and the culture of member states.
00:30:01.520And he is essentially saying that right now, the EU is ravaged by illegal migration, by the war in Ukraine, and also by the loss of economic competitiveness, and that this has to change.
00:30:15.240And everything the opposition had to say was, you're a Russian asset, you're a Chinese asset, and everything is okay.
00:30:41.840Well, I would say that, you know, I agree with you, Karl.
00:30:45.240I'm unburdened by what has been, but the problem with the EU is that it's just such a legalistic organism.
00:30:49.920And so much of it's, there are so many inbuilt destinations written into its treaties, and they'd be incredibly arduous to have to kind of course correct at this point and make it more of a confederation of states rather than a federal super state, which I imagine is what Orban means by, he wants it just to be a confederation of cooperating, but nevertheless sovereign states.
00:31:10.140I don't think that's likely to happen anytime soon.
00:31:12.360Yes, I don't think that was the purpose of it at all, either.
00:31:14.320The real sort of idealistic visionaries of it, people like, what's he called, Jean Monnet, who certainly saw it as a kind of way of...
00:31:22.740But to add to your point, there have been voices within the EU who are saying basically we need to expand the union, and they don't say anything about the direction towards which they expand, but it is implicit.
00:31:35.660It's implicit that they treat it just as a managerialist organization that is functioning so as to crush the national identity of the member states.
00:31:44.960But what is interesting here is just with other figures like Millet and Bukele at the UN is that we have to see what these dissident voices mean for the people.
00:31:57.120Because, for instance, I don't know about Orban.
00:31:59.980I don't know about what, you know, I don't know a lot about what he's doing.
00:32:06.160I'm not defending everything that he says.
00:32:08.300But what is interesting is that it seems to me to be that he is the only voice within the EU who just calls for sanity.
00:32:16.900He's one of the few voices, let me say, the EU calls for sanity.
00:32:21.300And here we have the Slovenian MEP of European Parliament, Branko Grimms, who basically said that Hungary is peaceful, Hungary is safe.
00:34:10.200I've seen initiatives, packages, proposals that have been greeted with high hopes and all of them have failed.
00:34:16.820He's talking about the multiculturalist dream that everything can work.
00:34:21.580And he says the only reason for this, believe me, is that without external hotspots, we cannot protect Europeans from illegal migration.
00:34:31.400So what is interesting here is that he says something that is obvious.
00:34:35.940He says that what happens is with a lot of people who are asking for asylum, they come within the union and they stay within the union for as long as their application is pending.
00:34:47.520And then even if their application isn't get accepted, what they have deportation orders and a lot of deportation orders expire and are not enforced.
00:35:00.340So he says we need just external hotspots.
00:35:03.060People have to apply from outside the union to come within the union.
00:35:07.120That seems to me to be just common sense.
00:35:09.080And also he says something, he speaks in the language of leftists here, where he says that illegal migration is Europe has led to antisemitism, violence against women and homophobia.
00:35:21.820And says facts are facts, whether you like them or not.
00:35:36.880And I will show you what happened also about Germany.
00:35:40.440Now, here we have Ursula von der Leyen, who gave a headline address in the European Parliament today.
00:35:47.100And she essentially had to say that she's going to address three points.
00:35:52.320War in Ukraine, economic competitiveness and migration.
00:35:58.740And essentially her whole shtick was you're a dictator who is a Russian asset and a Chinese asset.
00:36:06.360Again, I really want to stress, no one voted for von der Leyen.
00:36:11.220Yes, she's even considered something of a failed politician in Germany.
00:36:15.060I mean, this is the other thing as well.
00:36:16.440It's not just that being elected has some sort of automatic value.
00:36:22.520It means to an end, it means that there are direct lines of accountability between the decisions you make and whether those are vindicated at the next election.
00:36:28.420And Orban has, whatever you think of him, consistently been vindicated in terms of the policies he pursues.
00:36:38.560And it's really good because we have some hard evidence published by the federal German police about crime statistics in Germany, which is the country of Ursula von der Leyen.
00:36:50.440And here we have her saying, I want to address the Hungarian people.
00:37:36.880And we have here from the European Conservative a shocking federal police report that talks about the effects that this vision of Ursula von der Leyen has for her country, for Germany.
00:37:49.980The Germany that gave birth to her and that she is supposed to represent, unless I'm completely mistaken.
00:37:57.320And I'll give you just some very hard evidence.
00:38:00.600This is a report by the Federal Police of Germany that published some statistics.
00:38:06.720And it says, annual crime for the year 2023 has risen by 12%, 12.5%.
00:38:15.420Crime in 2023 in Germany has risen by 12.5% comparatively to the year 2022.
00:38:26.340Non-Germans are six times more likely to engage in knife attacks than German citizens.
00:38:32.420Sorry, can we just, so the total number there was 790,000.
00:40:20.760I mean, I wanted to say you cannot explain this without citing the very things that Ursula von der Leyen does not want us to talk about.
00:40:28.640And she thinks talking about consists hate speech.
00:40:32.020Now here, Viktor Orban basically said that he is being criticized as being a Russian asset.
00:40:38.580But whether we like it or not, when we have wars, wars must stop and there needs to be a ceasefire and there need to be lines of communication rather than just...
00:40:50.580Any of these sort of allegations without any kind of substantive evidence, it reminds me of the kind of worst of 20th century partisanship.
00:42:00.820So unless you turn Hungary into a place that has the severe crime tendencies of Germany, we're not going to give you funding and we're going to block your funding and also...
00:42:12.520Not just the crime tendencies, but unless you're prepared to transition your children and suggest that all things are equal in every way.
00:42:22.440That's exactly why people look up to Orban and they say that, you know, we want a Europe that respects its children and respects its younger generation and the family.
00:42:35.940And there is another thing because Hungary is constantly being attacked by the EU.
00:42:41.780They don't want to comply with the EU migration pact.
00:42:45.700The EU migration pact is a pact for the relocation of illegal migrants within the union and they find...
00:42:53.940And migrants within the union and they find Hungary with 200 million euros.
00:42:59.720One of the strange contradictions as well, because these are precisely the sorts of politicians who will claim that this is very culturally enriching.
00:43:06.140If it really was that culturally enriching, surely there would be a scramble to see who could get the most of them.
00:43:21.540I'll show you a very funny response by Orban when he was accused by the other MEP members, the members of the European Parliament and other bureaucrats there, that he has a strong Russian lobby within Hungary that he allegedly...
00:43:38.000Just as a quick pause on that as well.
00:43:40.380Like, why would anyone take lectures from the Germans about being Russian assets?
00:43:44.960So you made your entire country totally dependent on Russian energy and then got screwed over by the Americans when Russia decided it was going to invade Ukraine.
00:43:54.000Like, I wouldn't take lectures from them ever at all about this subject.
00:44:17.980There are definite national differences in how the Hungarians view Russia and how the Poles view Russia, which are interesting given that they've both got quite similar histories.
00:44:26.300And Poland's probably been more persecuted by Russia historically than Hungary has.
00:44:29.220But there was, you know, obviously the Soviet communism and the putting down the uprising in 56.
00:44:34.240And they also put down the Hungarian liberal national revolution in 1848 as well.
00:45:00.700But what I was going to say, sorry, is that I'm in Hungary quite a lot.
00:45:04.500And when I'm at these things, there are far more Poles present than there are Russians.
00:45:09.420I mean, I've never actually encountered a Russian at one of these sort of conferences in Hungary where people like Orban and Balazs Orban will speak.
00:45:33.060I'll mute him and say, he says, the number of Russians working in Hungary, he says this pure hypocrisy, last year we issued 3,000 permits, that makes a total of 7,000 Russians working in Germany.
00:45:50.780And he says, there are 300,000 Russians working in Germany.
00:46:24.280And when it comes to hypocritical lying, we have the Spanish head of the delegation of the Spanish Vox Party in the European Parliament, Jorge Buxade, yeah.
00:46:39.020And he called the structure a house of demonic hypocrisy.
00:47:22.700Just why would I ever listen to any of these people on any of those subjects?
00:47:25.840And just to sort of end the segment, he basically says, I'm deeply sorry, but I will not be indebted to you or any of you.
00:47:33.860If we're attacked, I will defend my country.
00:47:36.180So what is interesting here is that we see a different vision.
00:47:39.320One that, as you said before, wasn't the original vision of the EU.
00:47:44.740But a vision that could happen, that could take hold within the future.
00:47:52.020Because you could say that there is no particular problem with having a union that does respect the sovereignty and culture of each member.
00:48:06.580Europe isn't as powerful as it was 100 years ago or 150 years ago.
00:48:12.400There are very large players outside of Europe that could play divide and conquer within Europeans.
00:48:19.600But primarily, they shouldn't use the EU to do this.
00:48:23.960The EU should be the obstacle to foreign interference within Europe.
00:48:29.800It should be the obstacle to dividing and conquering Europeans.
00:48:36.460The problem is, right, the Germans are the obstacle to European solidarity because of this demand, this kind of demand.
00:48:45.360The Hungarians are not constitutionally the same sort of people as the Germans.
00:48:49.800They're not incredibly far left, right?
00:48:52.040They weren't dominated by liberalism and communism.
00:48:53.940Well, they weren't dominated by communism, but they're very much more obviously a sort of traditional people and see themselves as such.
00:49:02.620Whereas the Germans are not and they don't see themselves as such.
00:49:04.940They're very much concerned with being moderns.
00:49:07.260And this kind of intransigence and intolerance towards the differences within the European peoples is the problem of the German leadership.
00:50:30.900Okay, so let's finish on a Friday afternoon with something a bit fun, shall we?
00:50:35.880Because this is something that crossed my timeline, if we can get to the next one, Samson.
00:50:40.160And it was just, it was a very strange thread I began to pull on.
00:50:46.760And it just came out of, like, as soon as I started looking into it, I realized, oh, this is just emblematic of everything that is wrong with the modern West, in particular Europe.
00:50:56.540And you can see I'm using very strange sources for this, because this wasn't something that sort of hit the mainstream very hard.
00:51:02.840And so, in 2001, as you can see, Danish ships off the coast of Nigeria had an encounter in the Gulf of Guinea, had an encounter with about nine pirates on a fairly small boat.
00:51:20.120Now, you've probably seen the videos of, like, the Somali pirates taking oil tankers and, you know, cargo ships and stuff like that.
00:51:38.500But anyway, you've seen the video of the Somali pirates, where they, just on a fairly small, speedy boat, I don't know anything about boats, I'm just describing the attributes of it, rather than the name of it.
00:51:46.820So, they zoom up to a tanker, put ladders up it, climb up it, and then just, you know, I'm the captain now, you know.
00:51:53.860Like, so that's how these things are done.
00:51:55.900And the same sort of thing happens in the Gulf of Guinea, around the sort of curve in the other side of Africa.
00:52:02.380And so this is what happened in this clash.
00:52:05.120One of the four suspected pirates that were captured, so there were, I think there were nine of them, four of them got shot, one of them got away, somehow, and four of them were captured.
00:52:17.460One of the four captured, after a shootout with Danish troops, has had to have his leg amputated in 2001.
00:52:33.080And this has been going on for three years.
00:52:35.260And so the operation was carried out on the Danish frigate Esbern Snare, due to the severity of the wounds, to his lower limb, according to a Danish admiral.
00:52:44.040Four gunmen were killed and four more captured in the incident.
00:52:47.640Oh, no, there may have been another person on board, but there's no trace of him being found, so maybe he fell into the sea or something.
00:52:53.720And the firefight sank the smaller boat, and so the naval personnel had to pick them out of the water and rescue them.
00:53:00.840And the battle was the first time the alleged pirates had been killed by foreign naval forces.
00:53:06.640So they were investigating the small boats that had eight or nine Nigerians on it, because they seemed very suspicious, because they had ladders and guns.
00:53:17.220And so, okay, you look like you're a pirate vessel, a modern pirate vessel.
00:53:22.060You know, sort of historic pirate vessels are cooler and bigger and have big black sails.
00:53:32.200Yeah, and so the Danish troops fired warning shots, the men into the air, the men started firing at the Danes, and so the Danes started firing back.
00:53:39.820And it was something that went badly for them.
00:53:44.480And Danish legal experts, though, the survivors have been charged with attempted murder, but Danish legal experts have said there's a risk that Denmark could fail to secure convictions because it can be difficult to prove piracy.
00:53:53.780Because, I mean, look, we're just hanging out on the sea with a bunch of guns and a bunch of ladders on our boat, right?
00:57:01.000But the Justice Minister of Denmark said, no, no, it's, you know, it's fine.
00:57:06.840Maybe it'll deter other pirate attacks, things like that.
00:57:09.720And so, they extradited this guy back to Denmark.
00:57:12.980Again, no one would claim him, so he didn't have any particular support there.
00:57:16.940And the BBC do point out in this that this is actually fairly common.
00:57:22.540Not one-legged pirates, but piracy itself.
00:57:26.180Because the Gulf of Guinea often has tankers with oil and gas travelling through it.
00:57:31.000And so, it's a piracy hotspot, which is, of course, why Danish troops were there in the first place.
00:57:34.900Political instability, lack of law enforcement, and poverty on the land are the factors which contribute to the increased amount of piracy in the area.
00:57:41.720So, he goes back to Denmark, and in Denmark, they basically say, yeah, no, we're not going to charge you with anything.
00:57:50.260It's like, okay, but, I mean, it's an occupational hazard.
01:03:19.460And it's the same, it's particularly pronounced with Muslims in Britain as well, or sort of militant Muslims in Britain who kind of hang around Speaker's Corner.
01:03:28.100Like, their Muslim forebears were conquerors.
01:05:14.660There was nothing forcing them to do it.
01:05:16.060And so, somehow now, he's just living in a house in Denmark at the behest of the Danish taxpayer, all because he was trying to be a pirate.